Last week's mess will soon be just another memory. The insurance company paid off the price I paid for that car almost in full. I'm going to try living without the luxury of a car - using my girlfriend's/my old mazda when necessary. The idea of having no car debt for the next 5-6 years seems awfully nice right now.

Once again I've changed the print prices, they're way more reasonable than they were before... and I added limited edition Fine Art prints as well. Everyone should be able to afford smaller sized prints now so please buy some! The 'buy a print' link is easier to see on the main page now; when you click on any image, the link should be right under the larger version of it.

Every genius is allowed a horrible product every 10 years or so.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/08/update-on-google-wave.html

Today I noticed that insideniagara.com redirects to Yahoo! Canada. Strange. I check that site regularly for movie listings...

Update: As a result, I built a quick movie reference page for Cineplex theatres in the Niagara Region: miklos.ca/cineplex_niagara.

It was treated as an oddball twist in the otherwise wrenching saga of the BP oil spill when Kevin Costner stepped forward to promote a device he said could work wonders in containing the spill's damage. But as Henry Fountain explains in the New York Times, the gadget in question - an oil-separating centrifuge - marks a major breakthrough in spill cleanup technology. And BP, after trial runs with the device, is ordering 32 more of the Costner-endorsed centrifuges to aid the Gulf cleanup.

via news.yahoo.com

via: National Post

First things first, I've added a lightbox feature to the main page. Click on any image on the main page to initiate it. You can also select a tag from the tags page and do the same. Clicking the title within the lightbox popup will take you to the permanent link of the photo. Secondly, I separated the portfolio tag and added it to the main menu. I'll be shuffling photos around in that tag to keep it fresh. Enjoy!

I released a new site design today, which has a few sources of inspiration (the front page is very much like www.ricecracker.net for example.) The old site can be found at 2010.miklos.ca.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/celebrating-pac-mans-30th-birthday.html
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20005528-52.html

Here we go again! The 75km fundraising bike ride for Multiple Sclerosis is coming up once again... Please pledge me by clicking here (or the big blue button below.) You can send your donation any time between now and August 22nd.

Pledge Me Online

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html

Driving around the country for 4 days straight sure takes a lot out of you! Tomorrow is a day of rest. The day after that, down to Apagy. As I said before, check out the photos from the trip: http://jui.cc/dw

Hungary is awesome so far. We've driven practically everywhere... View the photos in my flickr stream.

^{Photo by: Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse}

I got the idea when I tried to find out more about some photos I found on a flea market. Trying to discover where they were taken I looked around my city, found the locations and took photos to compare then and now. Mixing them was just a experiment and because I was happy with the result I decided to do the same with other historical photos. I am a historical consultant for film, tv, authors, museums, etc. and I even have a 1930s lifestyle. History is part of my daily life, I can’t help but see the shadows of the past.

Found in a PetaPixel post.

http://blip.tv/play/hKN7gc3AGAI

http://static.miklos.ca/docs/canada_area_code_map.pdf

Last night I learned that scrambled eggs don't have to be made in a frying pan. It is also possible to microwave them in a mug, and get evenly cooked, fluffy scrambled eggs.

We're going to Hungary next month, and we have to jump through hoops to get Nikki's passport. They didn't accept her birth certificate, it was "void", so we have to wait until one arrives that cost us $65 because we added an extra $30 to the price to make sure it gets here in 5 business days. Anyway, back to the passport thing... Here's a beautiful document justifying why a Canadian passport costs $87CAD: http://www.ppt.gc.ca/support/faq.aspx?lang=eng&id=540

The fee for an adult passport is CAN$87. Of this amount, CAN$25 is used to recover the costs incurred by the Department of Foreign Affairs in providing consular services to Canadians abroad.

As for the remaining CAN$62, the breakdown is as follows:

- 47% towards security fees (e.g.: examination, guarantor checks)
- 43% towards production fees (e.g.: material, printing)
- 6% towards administration fees (e.g.: business sustaining)

Couple of questions arise:

1) Isn't the abbreviation for Canadian Dollars "CAD"

2) "For the remaining $62, the breakdown is as follows" ... 47%+43%+6% = 96% ... What? Where's the extra 4% going?

3) Let's forget the mistakes on the site, do our taxes not already pay for government employees to sit on their ass and do their job? Or is their job strictly to sit on their ass and collect good money? Any "actual" work gets added on and broken down into 47%=THEIR already paid manual labour, 43% WE pay for their ink and paper and 6% administration fee a.k.a. just to round it off to 100% .. or wait...

What a bunch of bull.

Dave and I had an idea years and years ago about a website that would show projects in the Niagara region. This new government site is close to it, but not quite as detailed as what we had in mind.
http://jui.cc/C9

Quick function to display ordinal date in cfml (eg: 1st, 2nd, 3rd)

<cffunction name='ordinalize'>
 <cfargument name='day' required='yes'>
  <cfif day eq 1 or day eq 21 or day eq 31>
   <cfreturn day&"st">
  <cfelseif day eq 2 or day eq 22>
   <cfreturn day&"nd">
  <cfelseif day eq 3 or day eq 23>
   <cfreturn day&"rd">
  <cfelse>
   <cfreturn day&"th">
 </cfif>
</cffunction>

http://golang.org/

I would've never thought that a place like this exists.
Map: http://jui.cc/ub, Homepage: http://pimaair.org/

In case you weren't following, Canada just won gold against USA. Our friend Mr. Varga was on the edge of his seat.

I made a bit of a change to jui.cc. When you go to a jui.cc URL, it'll now display a bar at the top of the page with the contents of the URL below it. For example, see the jui.cc URL for my site: http://jui.cc/1

Peter and his coworkers over at Virgo have been working all week to get a flash project working that will stream their former prime minister's speech live (2010-02-05 14:00 GMT).. It has a live twitter feed and has voting capabilities. As a programmer, stuff like this is exciting when it's on such a large scale: http://backchannel.virgo.hu/

A1, A2, A3, A4 .. etc etc. My cousin asked for some A4 size prints today and I had no idea what that actually is... so for the North American folk, here's a conversion chart lifted from Wikipedia:

ISO paper sizes in inches

Format	A	B	C
0	33.1 × 46.8	39.4 × 55.7	36.1 × 51.1
1	23.4 × 33.1	27.8 × 39.4	25.5 × 36.1
2	16.5 × 23.4	19.7 × 27.8	18.0 × 25.5
3	11.7 × 16.5	13.9 × 19.7	12.8 × 18.0
4	8.3 × 11.7	9.8 × 13.9	9.0 × 12.8
5	5.8 × 8.3	6.9 × 9.8	6.4 × 9.0
6	4.1 × 5.8	4.9 × 6.9	4.5 × 6.4
7	2.9 × 4.1	3.5 × 4.9	3.2 × 4.5
8	2.0 × 2.9	2.4 × 3.5	2.2 × 3.2
9	1.5 × 2.0	1.7 × 2.4	1.6 × 2.2
10	1.0 × 1.5	1.2 × 1.7	1.1 × 1.6

I bought 2 tickets to Hungary today. They are for April. Apparently weather is nice there late April. Anyway, we're pretty excited! This will be my second visit within 2 years.

Click on image to enlarge. Origin unknown.

http://www.yahooanswerfail.com/